A cute but unassuming spot, small but cozy, the café resides on Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s east end. And, in less than a year, it has become something of a destination to rival a few of its more established neighbours – hardly a small achievement in a part of town well-known for its restaurants and eateries.

But this café is cut of a decidedly different cloth. Co-chefs Tina Leckie (who also owns the café) and Alex Chong bring to it a passion for great food, as well as a strict philosophy for how to source, prepare and serve it. It’s a modus operandi honed through years of hard work under the guidance of some of Toronto’s best-known chefs and restaurateurs, all accumulated prior to opening the café in August of 2011.

Leckie has been working in restaurants and bakeries since high school, when she took on a co-op job with Dufflet, a well-known Toronto pastry shop. Later, while completing her business degree (majoring in hospitality), Leckie took on a staging position at Opus, where she mostly helped out in the kitchen and took note of her surroundings.

Since then, through a stint with acclaimed chef Michael Stadtlander at Eigensinn Farm and a six-year tenure at Celestin in midtown Toronto – with a break in between spent working at Epi Breads bakery café, where she met Chong – Leckie worked in a variety of unique culinary environments.

Eventually, however, she reached a point when she felt the need to do her own thing – and the time had come to make a decision. She left Celestin – where she had become sous-chef – to open a café.

“You get tired of working under people who have different values than you do,” says Leckie. “[I started to feel like] what I believe in is this and I understand it’s what they believe in, but it’s not necessarily what I believe in. . . [You] hit a point in your life where you [think], well, I have no major commitments. I don’t have kids, I’m not married, I don’t own a car, I don’t own a house. If I’m going to do it, it might as well be now.”

Chong, for his part, has worked for such well-known chefs as Susur Lee, Masayuki Tamaru – and finally Michael Caballo, with whom he worked at Niagara Street Café (now Edulis). He then spent some time in Chianti, Italy, working with Caballo at La Petraia, Michael Grant and Susan McKenna Grant’s farm and restaurant.

It was through Chong’s experience at La Petraia, as well as his work with Caballo, that he gained a passion for creating dishes from fresh, locally-sourced ingredients – and working with whatever is available at any given time.

“[La Petraia is] a really gorgeous place,” Chong recalls. “[It’s] a bio-dynamic farm. You raise your own animals; everything that we [would] serve to the guests [came] off the farm. We pressed our own olive oil. . . And if we were looking for something else that we weren’t growing, we just walked off the property into the forest, picked wild apples. It was pretty amazing.”

Alex Chong picks vegetables from a garden. “I learned a lot from (Michael Caballo). He uses the best of ingredients, only of that moment. It’s only here for a couple of weeks.You only use it then, then it’s gone.” (Photo: Supplied photo/Tina Leckie/Cafe Fiorentina)

It’s this philosophy towards fresh food that Leckie and Chong enthusiastically adopted for their new café. The two of them spend hours each week sourcing their ingredients from local suppliers, or even sometimes foraging for it themselves. Their meats are often purchased from the Meat Dept, a small butcher shop across the street from the café, which in turn works exclusively with small farmers. And they’re adamant about not using anything that’s out-of-season.

The menu, consequently, changes every day – and usually multiple times per day. If they get chicken one week, they’ll make something different out of it each day. If they run out of an ingredient for a panino one afternoon, they’ll change things up again and offer something new. It may sound a bit complicated, but it’s exactly how they want things to be, not to mention a perk of being in charge.

“[I love] having that freedom to say, ‘No, I don’t want to buy tomatoes in January.’ Because they’re disgusting. So I’m not going to do that. And if a customer comes in and asks, ‘Can I have tomatoes on my salad?’ No. We don’t offer that. But we can give you tomato chutney or some preserves that we’ve made with a tomato base.'”

A selection of meats on offer at Cafe Fiorentina. “We don’t make our own cheeses,” says Leckie. “But all the charcuterie, all the breaking down of the meats. . . we’ll form them in some way, we’ll braise them, cook them.” (Photo: David Kates/Postmedia News)

Holding to such a strict set of principles, of course, isn’t easy, and has presented a number of challenges for the owners. First and foremost is the cost. Sourcing the foods they want is rarely cheap, for example, and yet they’re hesitant to pass the premium costs onto their customers.

“When . . . I’m buying meat at an extraordinary amount of money and I’m making very little on a sandwich that I’m selling for not enough money, it’s challenging,” says Leckie. “But at this point in the game, I’m not trying to be rich. I’m trying to keep [menu items] at an affordable level so that people can come in and not feel like, ‘How much am I spending on that?’ But at the same point they’re getting to try something that’s really good.”

It also requires a lot of time and effort to find the right ingredients. Leckie and Chong spend countless hours at farmers’ markets, sometimes chatting with farmers to find out when they bring in certain foods. Other times, they’ll go out foraging for fresh ingredients themselves.

Naturally, however, some menu items are popular enough that they have remained constant. The farm egg salad, for instance – made with fresh heritage eggs sourced from a farmer friend – has been popular enough that they’ve had to offer it at least once every week.

Tina Leckie shows off a carton of heritage eggs, a key ingredient on the menu at Cafe Fiorentina. “All our eggs come from a friend farmer that I have,” says Leckie. “They’re all beautiful, all multi-coloured. They’re all heritage eggs.” (Photo: David Kates/Postmedia News)

The customers, for their part, have turned out to be receptive to the changing menu.

“They’re extremely loyal,” says Leckie. “They value good food. They value local and house-made. So for that it’s really easy. And I have some customers who are absolutely fantastic. If they see my excitement in something . . . they’re like, ‘Done. Sold. Give me whatever you’re talking about. I want to try it.'”

The menu at Cafe Fiorentina. “Every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes three timesa day, one of those items will change,” says Leckie. “We make really small batches, and when it goes, it goes.” (Photo: David Kates/Postmedia News)

The response on the Danforth has been overwhelmingly positive. From opening day – they opened just ahead of the annual Taste of the Danforth street festival – local residents flocked to the new café, and many of them went on to become regular customers. It’s translated into considerable success for Leckie and Chong, and meant that they haven’t had to do much looking back.

And yet, as well as things appear to be going now, Leckie still faced the initial challenges of getting the business off the ground in the spring and summer months of 2011. After a false start when she attempted to partner up with someone else – a deal that ultimately fell through amid a dispute with the would-be landlord – Leckie might have given up. But her mother, Vanda Dell’Agnese, stepped in and has been a tireless supporter and motivator. A retired teacher, she now spends the bulk of her time helping out at the café.

“She grabbed my arm, said, ‘Okay, where do you want to go?'” Leckie recalls. “And I said, let’s go to the Danforth. So we walked up and down the Danforth, saw this sign for rent and immediately called them. I wouldn’t have this on the Danforth if she hadn’t come and banged on my door and said, don’t mope, get up and be strong.”

An anonymous investor, meanwhile, played a crucial role in helping Leckie get the business started.

“[The investor] didn’t ask too many questions. Just said, ‘I believe in you. This is your dream. Tell me what you need and we’ll try to make it work,'” says Leckie.

Even getting Chong to join her in the new business was hardly a sure thing at the time – although in retrospect it’s nearly impossible to imagine the business without their partnership at the centre. She managed to pull him away from a job as sous-chef at Didier to work with her at the café.

Alex Chong works in the kitchen at Cafe Fiorentina. “Alex and I fight to make a point to put things on the menu to try to sell people on,” says Leckie. “And once they have it, they love it. But to get it to sell is very difficult.” (Photo: Supplied photo/Tina Leckie/Cafe Fiorentina)

But for the most part, Leckie insists that the biggest challenge was the initial one, in striking out on her own. She claims not to dwell too much over the daily struggles.

“I’ve worked with cooks for 12 years. We all have dreams, we all say it and we all talk about it. But to actually quit your job and take that first step and say, okay, I’m going to go and do this, is really hard . . . And then once that hurdle is covered, everything else just kind of falls into place.”

Looking ahead, what can we expect from Leckie and Chong? While there are no big expansion plans – no additional locations, to be sure – they’re hoping to expand into dinner and take-out offerings, as well as catering for special events. They now have weekend brunches. But while they have widened their range of options, they remain steadfast about getting things right, always cautious not to overreach.

On that note, while they have shifted their hours to (just barely) cover dinner, they’re still hesitant to offer a dinner menu. Doing so, Leckie believes, would require them to lose a lot of the flexibility they currently enjoy as a café. And even while they now have a few take-out items and eventually hope to offer more, she wants to ensure that they don’t lose the high standard of quality that got them where they are.

For now, the plan is to stick to what they know, keep closely tuned in to what their customers are demanding, and use their best judgment.

And, as always, keep doing what they love to do.

Looking in from the front door at Cafe Fiorentina. (Photo: David Kates/Postmedia News)